I’ve heard more than once that Meetup.com is a good way to reach new people so we’re looking at how to use it effectively and that’s not clear yet. The challenge is that Meetup feels like the destination rather than a pointer to the final event site. That makes sense for a lot of informal meetups or even something larger where the site provides all that is needed, but that doesn’t work (we think) for us. It’s potentially confusing for a registrant to click “I’m attending” on Meetup and not realize that they aren’t registered on the SQLSat site. I notice ONETUG here in Orlando is dealing with the same challenge as far as maintaining a user list, asking via a one question survey when you join the ONETUG meetup if you’re already a member of ONETUG. Clunky. Yet it seems too powerful to not do something. Options:

• Just list the event on the oPASS & MagicPASS(is there one?) meetup pages
• Create a SQLSaturday Orlando meetup and work hard at pushing them on to the main SQLSaturday site
• See if PASS can create a SQLSaturday meetup that would include all the events

I like the last one, but I don’t think we know enough to start on that just yet. That leaves us with options 1 and 2, and of those, we’re thinking creating the SQLSaturday Orlando meetup is the best idea to try to start with. We’ll see. You can take a look at http://www.meetup.com/SQLSaturday-Orlando/events/184354832/. It’s $19 a month paying by the month, or $12 a month in 6 month chunks. I signed up for a month and we’ll see if we think it’s worth spending $144 a year to maintain it.

Changing to Twitter, Kendall is working on following all the Twitter handles from the past SQLSaturday Orlando events. That leads to a deeper discussion of what do we want to do going forward? Not just for SQLSaturday, but both Orlando chapters. Ideally it’s an ongoing/daily/near real time process to follow people that sign up and that should lead back to us encouraging our members to join Twitter if they havent – it’s a nice alternate channel for messaging and not a bad way to network. What else can we do with it? No plan yet. This also seems like a place where the event site tools could do more.